It starts out as a high-school movie, and Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) is one of those perpetually new and awkward kids. \u201cYou said you wanna make more friends here,\u201d a kind friend (one of her few) reminds her, inviting her over for a slumber party; they lay on the floor and paint nails and talk about boys as Duran Duran plays on the radio (it\u2019s a mid-\u201880s period piece), and then, well, Maren tries to bite off her friend\u2019s finger. The reveal is superb, clever and horrifying; Maren, you see, is a cannibal, a deep and dark secret that she usually manages to keep hidden. She hurries home, covered in blood. Her father (Andr\u00e9 Holland) tells her to pack, and quickly: \u201cWhen the cops get here we have to be good and gone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Soon enough, her frightened father is good and gone himself (\u201cI gotta leave you to figure it out for yourself, like your mother did\u201d). He leaves her birth certificate, which has the name and hometown of her mother \u2013 who abandoned her before she even remembers \u2013 so she decides to try to find her. She\u2019s barely begun her journey when she encounters Sully (Mark Rylance, making some CHOICES), a wistful fella with medals on his coat, a feather in his hat, and a mouthful of gnawed-up chompers. \u201cI smelt you from the yahd, lil\u2019 missy,\u201d he tells her with a terrifying grin. \u201cWhen was the last time you fed?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She starts to learn the ropes of roving hobo cannibal life from Sully, but (wisely) parts company with him quickly; not long after, she meets Lee (Timothe\u00e9 Chalamet), another, younger cannibal, and handsome too, which doesn\u2019t hurt. \u201cI don\u2019t wanna hurt nobody,\u201d she insists; he replies, \u201cFamous last words,\u201d and soon they\u2019re hustling and grinding and squatting their way across the country, and falling into something like love, that specific kind of young love where it seems like you\u2019re the only two people in the world, except, in this case, even more so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Russell and Chalamet are good together \u2013 the way they create the clumsy inevitability of a first kiss is especially memorable \u2013 but this is very much her movie, her journey, with him sidelined in several key scenes. She\u2019s a real find; you can\u2019t catch her acting, in scenes where she\u2019s doing quite a lot of it, intermingling desperation and guilt and desire and fear. Most of the rest of the cast amount to guest appearances, but good ones: Chloe Sevigny does some remarkable things with her tiny bit of time, Michael Stuhlbarg is barely recognizable in a wonderful little character turn, Holland is used too briefly but quite effectively, and perhaps the best byproduct of Jessica Harper\u2019s stunt casting in the Suspiria<\/em> remake is her subtly wonderful scene as a grandmother with secrets (and a bang-on Minnesota accent). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bones and All <\/em>boasts a clever sound design (though Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross\u2019s score is surprisingly monotonous), and doesn\u2019t scrimp on the mighty convincing<\/em> gore. Guadagino again proves quite adept at staging striking compositions, creepy set pieces, moments of pitch-black comedy, and vivid flashes of memory and nightmares. It\u2019s 130 minutes, and most of it clicks right along. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That is, until it reaches the third act, which feels more than a little aimless \u2013 once certain business is put to bed, there\u2019s not much momentum to keep the narrative going. But that wandering is miles better than the jarring thriller climax that feels like it was air-dropped in out of a slasher movie \u2013 and a bad one. The action eventually works its way into a bathtub, which seemed too conscious to be coincidence, since you have to go all the way back to Fatal Attraction <\/em>to find a good movie that shits the bed this spectacularly in the home stretch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s too bad, because Guadagino is a good director with a feel for this material. It takes real skill to pull off the delicate emotions of their last, big, confessional dialogue scene, to balance everything that\u2019s come before and pull it together, and that is accomplished. If he\u2019d had the good sense to end the movie there, they might have really had something. “Bones and All” is now playing in limited release. It goes wide on Thanksgiving.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/bones2-1024x682.jpg\")
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